He stopped a couple feet away. Close enough to knee in the balls.
I showed him my fangs. “Stay the fuck away from me.”
He scowled. “You want to use the toilet or not?”
That’s why he was here? “Yeah,” I said before he could change his mind.
He undid the cuffs and stepped back.
My legs almost gave out beneath me. I stumbled, working out the cramps. But my arms were even worse. They’d gone numb, and moving them was sheer torture. I bit back a groan as I shook them out and brought them to my sides.
“Make it quick.” He jerked his head at the cell’s tiny bathroom, concealed behind a wall that didn’t reach the ceiling.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
The bathroom was bare bones—a steel sink and a toilet with no lid or seat—but it was a relief being able to move around and take a piss. I washed my face and stuck my head under the faucet to take a drink. The cold water eased my thirst, but somehow made the blood craving even worse.
I gulped down a few mouthfuls anyway, then stuck my wrists under the icy flow, wincing as it hit my raw, reddened skin. But the cold water helped, washing away the silver and easing the burn.
The guard rapped on the chest-high wall between us. “Back against the wall.”
I reluctantly obeyed.
As he put the first cuff around my wrist, I attempted a smile. “I don’t suppose you have a bloody steak in your back pocket?”
“No.” He snapped the other cuff into place.
“How about a glass of blood-wine?”
“No,” he said again, and left.
“A man of few words,” I muttered at his retreating back.
That was how the next forty-eight hours went. They released me from the cuffs twice a day to use the john and gulp down some water. Other than that, I was left alone in the dark.
I tried not to worry about Zoe. If they hadn’t thrown her in a cell, she was probably back in Montreal by now. I only hoped Victorine hadn’t banished her to the tower on Midnight Island…or worse.
The silver spread through my bloodstream, seeped into my muscles. I felt hot, then cold. My entire body ached, and my cuts and bruises stopped healing.
Near the dawn of the third day, the door opened, and a male’s broad-shouldered silhouette filled the doorway.
A familiar silhouette with short blond hair.
I squinted, trying to make out the man’s face. After being in near total darkness for so long, even the hall’s low lighting hurt my eyes. Maybe I was hallucinating again.
“Tomas?” My throat was so dry, it came out as a croak. I closed my eyes, looked again.
“Rafael.”
A rush of hope surged up in me. I broke into a grin and dropped my voice.
“How the hell—? Never mind. Just get me the fuck out of here.”
My eyes had adjusted enough to see details. He wore a T-shirt and rugged tactical pants, both black. With his square face and Slavic cheekbones, he looked like a big blond member of the Russian mafia, the human mafia, that is.
A smile stretched across his face. With Tomas, the wider the smile, the more dangerous he was.
Now it was so wide, I faltered. “Tomas?”
“I am not here to get you out,” he said in his precise English.
My spine prickled. “What?”
This was my father’s lieutenant. His oldest friend. The man who’d always been there for me and my brothers. Training us. Scolding us. Cheering us on.
I shook my head. He couldn’t be an enemy. It wasn’t possible.
“Did they capture you, too?” I tried to see past him into the hall.
He held up a blunt-fingered hand. “Wait.”
Heels tapped against the concrete floor and Prima Victorine came into sight—and Tomas seemed to be expecting her.
“Ah,” he said. “There you are.”
The prickle turned to full-blown alarm. All my fine hairs stood on end.
For once, she wasn’t wearing a dress. Instead she wore slim black pants, a silky red T-shirt, and short boots with heels so sharp they could’ve doubled as daggers.
My gaze swung back to Tomas. “What’s going on?”
He had that Rafe’s-fucked-up-again expression on his face. The one I’d seen more than once as a kid.
“You never could keep the dick in your pants, could you?”
My mouth dropped open. “What the fuck’s that have to do with anything?”
“Prima Victorine didn’t believe you’d get this far. She thought Zoe would tell you to go to hell. But I told her that if we give to you enough rope, you will hang yourself. You not only broke into Philippe’s lair, you staked the Tremblay lieutenant.”
I glanced at Victorine, but I got nothing—her expression was the same cold mask I’d seen more than once on Zoe, although with Victorine, I was pretty sure the ice reached clear to her soul.
I moistened my dry lips. “I don’t understand,” I said to Tomas. “You’re my father’s friend. Hell, you’re practically a member of the family. Why would you help the Tremblays?”
Was Tomas the mole? It seemed inconceivable, but it fit. Étan had not only known that I wasn’t Jean-Michel, but that I was a Kral.
And Tomas had known I was in Paris with Zoe. I’d told him myself.
Inside me, a dark fury flamed to life.
Later, I’d come to terms with the fact that the man I considered an honorary uncle had turned against me and my brothers. For now, I was determined to extract as much intel as I could from him.
Because I would escape. And Tomas would pay.
“We have interests in common,” Victorine said.
“What interests? What have you done to Zaq?”
“He’s in New York,” she said.
I was getting more confused by the minute. “But I thought Father’s here in Paris.”
“He left,” said Tomas. “He is supposed to be in New York. Zaq is setting the trap for him.”
“What trap? You’re planning to stake my father? Your own primus?”
“Not stake him. Save him.”
“Save him? What the hell are you talking about?”
Tomas had the little smile on his face that was his camouflage. Beneath that smile, he was a cold-hearted S.O.B. But he was supposed to be our cold-hearted S.O.B.
My stomach muscles tightened. I felt like I’d taken a gut punch. “You’re the mole. The man who’s been working with Victorine.”
“Yes.”
I gaped at him. I’d expected him to deny he was the spy, to tell me I had it wrong. What kind of sick fuck admits to being a traitor? But he seemed proud of it.
“But why?” I asked.
“You make him weak.”
“My father? What the hell are you talking about? He’s not weak.”
“You don’t know him like I do. Before you boys, before your mother, Karoly was strong. Ruthless. Now he worries about his family. He makes poor decisions. He makes the syndicate—our syndicate—accept his dhampir sons as his heirs.”
I stared at him. It was true. My father had named us the Kral heirs despite grumbling from the syndicate’s old guard. But that was his right as Kral Primus—which made Tomas a back-stabbing sonofabitch.
He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “He will learn that one by one, you have betrayed him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He will turn against Gabriel soon. I’ve planted information that Karoly will have to believe. And you will disappear after giving the key intel to Prima Victorine.”
I glanced at Victorine. “What kind of intel?”
“The location of every Kral coven,” she said.
I shook my head. “It won’t work. He won’t believe I did it.”
“No?” said Tomas. “He knows you. That you have the weakness for Princess Zoe. And the women, they are your downfall. He will believe that you were convinced that you had to do it. Perhaps to protect the princess from her mother’s anger.”
I lifted my chin. “And Zaq?”
“He will set the trap and try to stake your father. He will fail, of course, but Karoly will have to stake him in return. He is Primus. He can’t let his own son get away with such an attack.”
“That’s insane. Why the hell would Zaq stake Father?”
“That is the—how do you say it?—the genius part. Zaquiel believes Karoly has sicked the slayers on him—and not just him, but you and Gabriel. That’s how they broke him. They told him that Karoly has embedded a slayer in Gabriel’s staff who will send him soon to his final grave, and that you are next if he doesn’t stop your father first. He thinks that slaying Karoly is the only way to save you all.”
My stomach lurched. Tomas knew me and my brothers too well. The plan was clever—and convincing. The bastard was using our bond against us.
It felt like the ground I’d trusted, the bedrock that was Tomas, had crumbled beneath my feet and I was in an endless, gut-churning freefall.
“So that was you who texted me in Montreal.”
“Yes.”
Something occurred to me. “Did you even pass on my message to Father?”
A smirk. “No. And calling him yourself wouldn’t have helped. All his calls are being routed to me. He doesn’t even know that you’re in Paris. I intercepted the photo Philippe’s man sent to him.”
I jerked at the cuffs, forgetting the silver, forgetting everything but the fury seething in me at his betrayal.
“You thrice-damned son of a serpent.” I threw the words at him like the fists I wanted to smash into his lying, grinning face. “Father trusted you. Made you his lieutenant and treated you like family. You swore a fucking oath of loyalty.” I sent Victorine a look of loathing. “She must be paying you a helluva lot.”
“Victorine pays me nothing.” He unfolded his arms and paced closer. “I do not break my oath. But I also do not follow a weak man.”
“You won’t win. He’ll stake you first.”
“We shall see. His sons will be dead. He will be strong again. Like a primus should be.”
My chest jerked in and out. The depths of Tomas’s betrayal was still sinking in, but I turned to Victorine and dredged up a let’s-make-a-deal smile. It was the only weapon I had.
“Any chance we can negotiate something here?”
Her upper lip curled. “If it were up to me, I’d have already staked you.”
“Yeah, I got that. Loud and clear. But my father’s a reasonable man. What do you want in exchange for me? Territory? Gold?”
“Shut up,” Tomas snarled.
We both ignored him. Victorine raised a plucked black eyebrow.
“Why would I bargain with Karoly? I hold all the cards.”
True—at least, where I was concerned.
I shifted against the wall. “So why are you here?”
And is Zoe all right?
But I didn’t ask. Victorine wouldn’t tell me anyway, and it would only serve to remind her of Zoe’s part in this.
A smile lifted Victorine’s lips. The kind of smile that’s like an ice pick to the groin. “To remind you of my promise.”
Sweat trickled down my spine. For a moment, I was back in the hotel room with Victorine grinding a pointy heel into my solar plexus.
“If you ever touch the princess again, I will consider the truce broken. I won’t rest until I’ve sent you and your brothers to the final death.”
“And now you staked my lieutenant.” She was a foot away from me now.
She’d regained her composure since the last time I’d seen her. She was pure, ruthless prima. Not a hint of vampire blue tinted her eyes. Instead, they were the unforgiving black of a deep-sea creature.
“I should thank you,” she said. “You’ve given me the perfect excuse to break the truce. We’ve already leaked the information that a Kral staked the Tremblay lieutenant.”
Hell. I suppose I should’ve seen that coming.
I met her gaze, pretending my insides weren’t coated with fear. “To protect your daughter.”
Victorine’s composure cracked. She hissed. “You have no right to protect her, dhampir.”
“Go to Hades,” I growled back. “We both know you broke the truce first.”
“But no one knows that for sure except the people in this lair.” She touched a sharp red nail to my carotid.
I locked my knees and glared back, refusing to give an inch.
Victorine let out a slow breath. “We were speaking of my promise. And Rafael? You should know I always keep my promises. But I think”—she pressed the nail a little deeper—“you’ll be the last Kral to die. I want you to go to your final grave knowing that your family has been wiped from the face of the earth.”
She turned and glided from the cell, the only sound the tap-tap of those damn pointy heels.
Tomas shook his head and started to follow her.
I ground my teeth. “You blood-sucking prick. You can try to set us against one another, but you’d better watch your back, because when Father figures out what’s going on, he’ll hunt you down like a goddamn dog.”
Tomas reached out with a big paw to shut the door, closing the two of us in the cell together.
“You’re wrong.” He prowled back to me. “With you and your brothers dead, Karoly will need me more than ever. I have made sure that the evidence points to Victorine, not me.”
A dry laugh scraped my throat. “No, you’re wrong. You’re dead. You’re just too stupid not to realize it.”
That wiped the smile from his face. His mud-yellow eyes sparked blue. He grabbed my throat with one powerful hand.
“I should break your neck.” He stroked my trachea.
My Adam’s apple worked.
I was a dhampir—I wouldn’t die, but with my human blood I might not heal as cleanly as a vampire, leaving me a quadriplegic. But I knew Tomas. Showing fear could send him over the edge.
“You could.” I shrugged like we were discussing the best way to carve a turkey. “But we both know Philippe doesn’t want you to kill me yet. He seems to think he might need me.”
We stared at each other. His irises were outlined in a bright, neon-blue band now, and his fangs had extended. His fingers tightened on my throat. Then he released me—and smiled.
“You are right. But you are the one who is the prisoner, and no Kral but me knows you are here. Remember that the next time you call me the stupid one.”
He turned and left. The door thumped shut behind him.
I swore and slumped in the cuffs. They seared into my skin, and this time I let them.
23
ZOE
The following nights crept by with agonizing slowness. I remained confined to the yellow guest room.
The only person I saw Monday was Jean-Michel, who brought me fresh clothes. When I asked for news of Rafe, all he could say was that he hadn’t seen him personally, but that he was still alive and locked in a cell on the lowest level.
After that, Jean-Michel backed out of the room. “I’m sorry, but my orders are to have minimal contact with you.”
I spent the rest of the night pacing the damned bedroom until I thought I’d go mad.
Was Rafe all right? Had they drunk from him like they had his brother?
When dawn came, I practically threw myself into the day sleep. Anything to escape from the apprehension churning in me.
Tuesday evening, I came awake to a slow tap-tap-tap. Uneasiness trickled through me. My nose twitched at the familiar orange-and-clove scent of Opium.
I clawed myself the rest of the way awake.
Victorine sat on the Louis Quinze chair, tapping a toe of her cherry-red Christian Louboutin booties.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Slow and definite, like a military marching band.
“You’re awake.” She wore pants, a sign she meant business.
<
br /> I swiped a groggy hand over my face and pushed myself upright. “How long are you going to keep me in here?”
She swatted the question aside like I was a pesky fly. “I have a task for you.”
A jittery ball formed in the pit of my stomach. I swung my legs off the bed. “What do you mean?”
My phone appeared in her hand. “Zaquiel Kral’s number has been entered in your phone. I want you to call and tell him we have Rafael. Zaquiel has one week to complete his mission or his brother will be sold to a brothel as blood slave. Zaquiel will believe you. He knows you had a…fling—” her mouth pursed in distaste—“with his brother.”
Rafe, a blood slave.
The jittery ball ping-ponged into my chest. All the oxygen seemed to leak out of the room.
“No,” I said numbly. “You can’t.”
“Oh, but I can.” She held out the phone.
I pushed it away. “Call him yourself.”
She came to her feet. “Don’t fight me, Zoe. We both know that won’t go well for you. Make the call.”
I stood up, too. All I had on was the thin slip I’d worn to bed. It left me at a disadvantage, especially with the high-heeled boots giving Victorine several inches in height.
Work with her.
She held out the phone again. I took it, but made no move to phone Zaquiel.
“You’re going about this all wrong,” I said. “You’ve let your hatred of Karoly Kral blind you to everything else. But there are other options.”
I took a deep breath—and put it out there. My secret dream. “What if I took Rafe as my mate? His father would have to work with you then. The blood feud would be over for good.”
Something dark shadowed her features, but she didn’t speak.
I licked my lips and kept going. “Think about it. Imagine how much more power you’d have if we were connected to the Kral Syndicate by a blood tie.”
“Mated?” Her mocking chuckle hammered at me and my dream. “With that weak skirt-chaser of a dhampir? You must have oysters for brains if you think I’d agree to that. Now, make the call.”
“It could work,” I insisted. “It’s a strategic mating, one with benefits for both syndicates.”
Craved: A Vampire Syndicate Paranormal Romance (The Vampire Syndicate Book 2) Page 19